'
"What a thing is learning!" Battista exclaimed with reverence. "Here have I
and such as I been fumbling in the dark when the great ones of old saw
clearly! . . . It follows, then, that a voyage westward will bring a man to
Cathay?"
"Assuredly. But how will he return? If the earth is a sphere, his course
will be a descent, and on his way back he will have to climb a great steep
of waters."
"It is not so," said Battista vigorously. "Though why it is not so I cannot
tell. Travelling eastward by land there is no such descent, and in this
Mediterranean sea of ours one can sail as easily from Cadiz to Egypt as
from Egypt to Cadiz. There is a divine alchemy in it which I cannot fathom,
but the fact stands."
"Then you would reach Cathay by the west?"
"Not Cathay." The man's voice was very earnest. "There is a land between us
and Cathay, a great islandland beyond the Seven Cities of Antillia."
"Cipango," said Philip, who had read Marco Polo's book in the Latin version
published a year or two before.
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